Far from being a disaster, the collapse of the World Trade Organisation talks in Cancun, Mexico, offers the promise, admittedly a small one, of a better era in international affairs. The trouble with the WTO, despite its nominally democratic constitution, has always been that the giants of the developed world - the US, the EU and Japan - can divide and rule the weaklings of the developing world. They use some unsavoury methods: threats to cut off aid to unco-operative countries; offers of bilateral trade deals on the side to drive a wedge between alliances of poor nations; phone calls to capital cities in Africa, Asia and Latin America demanding (often successfully) the removal of particularly stubborn ambassadors and representatives. Now the developing countries have discovered the power of sticking together and just saying "no" to demands that they allow big corporations more or less unrestricted freedom to make money out of them.

Moreover, without the fudged deals and without the excuse (used in Seattle in 1999) that violent protests upset the negotiators' delicate nerves, the hypocrisy and double standards of the western powers are more clearly exposed. For example, four very poor African countries - Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad and Mali - demanded that the US stop its $3m-$4m annual subsidies to its domestic cotton farmers. These have contributed to the loss of $1bn a year in exports from the African countries' cotton industries - industries that were expanded at the behest of the World Bank. All the Americans could suggest was that they help the Africans start some other sort of business.

Whether the Cancun collapse is best followed by the collapse of the WTO itself is another matter. Even critics of the existing order, such as the environmental campaigner George Monbiot, argue that the WTO has more merit than most of the other big international institutions, including the UN, because it gives no inbuilt advantage to the great powers. Its decisions require unanimity and even the US vote counts for as much as Chad's. Its rules, backed by a disputes settlement procedure, are supposed to be as binding on rich countries as on poor.

The reality is less attractive. Poor countries often cannot afford the expensive and protracted disputes procedure and are forced to make disadvantageous "out of court" settlements. In any case, when push comes to shove, the WTO's only sanction is to allow a complainant to retaliate with trade restrictions. Chad's sanctions against the US will be mere pinpricks compared with what the US could do to Chad. For all the fine words, power is still what counts most.

The WTO has a deeper flaw. It accepts, as its title suggests, that trade is invariably beneficial. It is driven by money, not by people's rights or needs. Its role is to get barriers removed, not to contemplate the possibility that, in some circumstances, they may be a very good thing. Thus, the thrust of the Cancun summit was to persuade poor countries to agree to new rights for foreign capital and corporations: no laws or regulations that might damage their investments; no bars to foreign ownership of natural resources; no insistence on joint ventures with local firms; opportunities to compete for provision of public services such as water and health. In exchange, the rich were supposed to cut their domestic agricultural subsidies. Since the rich nations showed no sign of doing so (except in very limited respects), the summit collapsed. But many will be delighted that developing nations did not have the chance to bargain away their rights to make their own laws and run their own services in the interests of their own people. Even new opportunities for poor countries to export food may not be an unalloyed benefit: as Katharine Ainger reports (page 25), the protest groups that went to Cancun believe that each country should concentrate first on feeding its own population.

In other words, what is needed is a body that gives as much weight to ordinary people's welfare and to the planet's health as it does to trade - a world trade and development organisation. But we are probably better off with the WTO than without it. Frustrated at Cancun, the US and the EU will try to drive the same rules on investment through bilateral deals, picking off the weak countries one by one. The WTO at least gives them a forum in which they can jointly resist the bullying. It has proved willing to admit non-trade considerations - on the protection of patents, for example - when it suits the corporations for it to do so. If the WTO can be hijacked by multinational business - as it has been in recent years - why can't it now be hijacked by people with a different agenda?

Unmask this man

Can anybody explain exactly why we are not allowed to gaze upon such an important public employee as Sir Richard Dearlove (or C, as they call him in the office), the head of MI6? Sir Richard presumably sits behind a desk most of the day, like the editor of the Times or the manager of your local NatWest. Or are we supposed to believe that he goes on personal missions to the caves of Afghanistan or lurks in the Heathrow arrivals area ready to pounce with an exploding fountain pen on enemy infiltrators? Perhaps Sir Richard looks so little like James Bond and so much like, say, Ernie Wise that his appearance at the Hutton inquiry would have given comfort to our enemies and depressed national morale. The danger of terrorist attack will be quoted, but it is hard to see why Sir Richard is more deserving of protection than a leading politician or a general. One suspects that those who decide these things have read too many cheap novels.

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